Tuesday, October 7, 2008

If you happen to live near LA, here's your chance to tour the largest landfill in the country. Puente Hills Landfill is offering a tour of their landfill facilities, recycling facility, and water reclamation project (which is really amazing) to anyone interested. The tour is on OCT 25th and you can sign up here.

I was at the store today and my kids saw a Z bar, the junior version of the Clif Bars, and organic food bar that is pretty popular, and while a tad dry, pretty darn tasty to boot. I'm not a big fan of food bars to begin with, but Clif bars are a cut above inj my opinion as they are Organic and the company actually has their eye on sustainability. Simply put, they are a rockin company.

So my kids want a bar and they'd been good so i bought them for them. Now i had recalled something about Clif having a recycling program so now that kids are zonkered I looked them up, and sure enough, they have a program going with Terracycle that they helped replace.

Basically, get in touch with Terracycle via their website and they will send you 4 postage paid mailers. Fill them with 200 wrappers, send em off, and you're done. And if that's not cool enough, they will donate .02 to a charity or school of your choice for each wrapper you send in.

And if that isn't cool enough, check out this video! These guys are in their 20s and have created a company that in their own words "makes a product out of garbage". They decided to start selling worm tea and even turned down a $1 Million prize to do things their own way.

* I was sent something in a USPS priority mailer (8x10 flat style) and the gentleman who sent it made sure to highlight the Cradle to Cradle certification on the side. Apparently the USPS has a cradle to cradle certification for their packaging which takes into mind the creation, use, and eventual disposal of the product. Pretty cool!

Sunday, October 5, 2008

I was lucky enough to attend the Alternative Vehicle Expo in Santa Monica a few weeks ago and with the help of my good friend Charles shot a bunch of video, including some interviews with and shots of the new Chevy Volt, GMs production ready Plug In Electric Hybrid. I had grandiose visions of editing things nicely but it's just not happening so I'm cutting the stuff I shot into pieces and will be posting a few a day here. I figure alternative fuel vehicles don't exactly fit in with trash, but some of you may be interested.

I just got around to tallying the numbers for Oct 1st (I know a bit late as usual) and they seem to have stayed almost the same on many levels. I'm guessing that this is due to my scale and the fact that i have trimmed things down so significantly. On top of that, the stuff that's going down there is pretty light for the most part (again, the scale that only goes by .5 lb increments is partially to blame here). Amazingly, the paper actually dropped by 1.5 lbs which means that i have more going out (the worms) than coming in (junk mail is all but gone with a few pesky holdouts). Pretty cool.

I also spent about an hour cleaning the garbage in the basement (yes I know how psychotic that sounds) and thankfully found nothing more than the expected basement dwellers (small spiders, a few moving little guys I couldn't recognize) but nothing serious. It made me realize how allergic to dust i am, but that's got nothing to do with the trash. I will admit that i opened things/moved things with a tad bit of trepidation as I was totally afraid that I'd pull one box or move a tub and cockroaches would swarm out all over me. Thankfully, no such swarming.

I should add that the entire time I was down there, any noise that i made elicited a "what, what did you find" response from my wife upstairs as she was certain that i would find all sorts of things down there (although she'd never admit it). Once I realized it, I can't lie, i definitely threw a few "oh dear lords" out there just to get her going. Ahh, she's a saint, but ya need to keep your sense of humour about you when you're hoarding and ya need to keep it all clean.

I also closed out the second garbage box (I'll get a new one out of the dumpster up the street tomorrow) and started a third misc bin with a tub a friend gave me.

So i found that cool counter over on the right (if you're looking at the webiste that is) at, of all places, a site that is for AA and helps people keep track of their sobriety. I hope it's not disrespectful to use it, but i figured it links to them and I'm giving them credit for it. I actually saw it on the Cleanbin blog so thanks for the tip off.

That said, I'm not great with math so here's my question. It says 278 days have passed yet I'm on Day 277 today according to my calculations. Is this one of those "the twenty first century doesn't start until 2001" kind of things or did I miss a day somehow?